And The Heart Is Mine

This place of meditation, called Dhamma Mahi, is situated in a very quiet valley and is much smaller than the Vipassana academy of Igatpur, and when I arrived, there were only a few meditators. The center was behind a small hill called the Monkey Hill that towers over Jaipur, with a simple temple on top of it where the sadhus and the babas are chanting to God Rama day and night. On this little mountain live hundreds of so-called holy monkeys, which are fed by truckloads of bananas. Up on the hill the view encompasses the entire city of Jaipur and the extraordinary Maharaja palace, ‘The Palace of Winds’, painted in entirely in pink. To the right the enormous Nahargath Fortress towers over the entire city. The noise rising up from the city is deafening. Behind the Monkey Hill on the long walk to the Vipassana center there is an ancient dilapidated temple and a beautiful park full of flowers inhabited by screaming peacocks and wild parrots.

The meditation center in the hills of Jaipur also has a pagoda that can accommodate about one hundred meditators. There was a great silence in the valley, which was disturbed only by the screeching of the parrots early in the morning. I began a so-called self-course, which had the same daily rhythm that I was already familiar with, but which had to be organized by myself without any teachers or instructors. My meditation sittings were interrupted only by a couple of hours of daily gardening work. Aside from the caretaker I was the only person in the center. All in all I spent nearly five weeks in this center, and signed up for two more guided meditation courses lasting ten days each, and basically spent the entire time in meditation.

I left this quiet place towards the end of January together with a friend whom I had met in the center. The muscles in my entire body were so relaxed that I could barely hold a pencil. All my obsessions were gone. My eating habits were totally normal. Also, the impulse to want to escape from the world and its challenges was no longer there. I felt cleansed. It felt extraordinary to be able to allocate my attention once again to the normal hustle and bustle of the world.

Together we decided to travel into the interior of the country, the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. We traveled by train along the Narmada River. A few kilometers outside the city of Bhopal we took a bus, which took us into the mountain region that is now called Satpura National Park. My companion was very familiar with this region, as he had been living in India for the last fifteen years. He was certainly double my age, and had previously been a junkie. He had successfully overcome his drug addiction with the help of the Vipassana meditation. We drove deeper and deeper into the mountains, and in a small town on a high plateau we bought food supplies for two weeks. Then we started hiking into the middle of the Indian jungle to a place called ‘Shiva Mundi’, ‘The Silence of Shiva’, by the original indigenous people, the Gond-Baba of the Adivasi tribes

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. Shiva is one of the few gods whom the non-Hindu tribe Gond-Baba also worships. According to the legend, a demon was chasing Shiva in this area and he leapt from hill to hill, leaving his traces everywhere. Now these are places of worship and ritual. This entire region is littered with caves and cult sites that can be traced far back into the early history of mankind, where the people of the Stone Age were already living. In many of these caves one can find cave paintings of the Stone Age. Years later I learnt that Hindu and Buddhist monks were already using these sites as meditation and retreat sanctuaries centuries ago.

Because the indigenous people regard trees as sacred there are enormous ancient specimens of immense strength overwhelming majesty everywhere.

We cut across through very high and dense bamboo forests and encountered some mango trees, which were of enormous size and in whose crowns the monkeys were shrieking and romping around dangerously. In one of the main holy places in Shiva’s honor we once again refilled our food supplies and again saw dozens of caves, many of which were adorned by an erect black cobra carved from stone, a mark of Shiva. We criss-crossed on some difficult paths deeper and deeper into the jungle and finally found the place we were looking for.

An Indian Baba looked after this place in the middle of the jungle. It consisted of twenty to thirty small and large caves spread along the mountain ridge. Some of the places and caves were accessible only by a rope ladder. This place was dedicated only for meditation and was surrounded by deep silence. The cave of the baba was at the foot of a ravine and was in that way centrally located as a kind of a reception. An enormous palisade made of tree trunks surrounded his cave and protected it from leopards, tigers and other wild cats, for which this jungle was a habitat. At a first glance the Shiva Baba was completely neurotic and crazy. His eyes were somewhat brightened and totally veiled by the incessant smoking of marijuana. He was very friendly and made sure that we did not get disturbed during our retreat in this secluded area. He presented us with some tea as a welcome present.

We chose the last big cave, which reached deep into the mountain at the very end of a steep ravine and set up our camp place. All the items of everyday life had to be carried up through scattered boulders and paths carved in the stone. Every day we carried water with great effort up the hill in buckets after climbing down thirty minutes to a fabulously beautiful river. The same for fire wood. We had to keep the flames going throughout the entire night, because wild animals were swarming the place all around us. This included some really big wild cats, one of which had attacked a local and had injured him badly just a few days previously. We hung our food supplies on ropes from the rock ceiling. In spite of this the rodents of the night were trying to catch their share by jumping up high like acrobats.

We slept directly next to the fire at the entrance to the cave. Veiled in twilight at the very back of our accommodation there stood a man-size black cobra hewn from the rock. The Gond-Babas, gracefully moving around the forest carrying their axes and the machetes, would visit our cave every few days and put flower malas around the snake and perform Puja. They hardly took notice of our presence there and simply went about their business.

We would alternate watching the fire during the night and in the early morning hours our meditation would begin. Everything was done in silence, without speaking. All of this was an unprecedented challenge for the body and the mind. In the beginning we would meditate in the morning in the cave or on the platform in front of the cave overlooking the green valley that stretched before us. Every day after lunch we would descend, take a bath in the river and sit on the river-bank in meditation until evening. We did nothing else but observe everything that was happening inside the body just allowing it to come and go. After a few days I heard the voice of the river echo in my ears as a melodious symphony. It felt like a hug. I would sit for hours without the slightest movement and slowly an immense sadness, stirred by the song of the river, arose in the depths of my heart. What was I doing here?

As always I was sitting directly by the water when I suddenly became aware of death, my own and that of others. I was overcome by the memory of the death of my father, in all its horror and its repercussions, which I had experienced as a five-year-old child

Absolutely nothing had changed. The principles (laws) of the world were still the same as before. I could not escape them, not even through ceaseless meditation. I wept incessantly. My companion was slowly becoming uneasy, in spite of all his years of meditation practice, as my grief would not end. Just as before, when I was overeating and throwing up, I was now addicted to endless meditation in order to somehow master my existence, in order not to have to feel this basic knowledge of death. Other people could anaesthetize this unconscious notion with career, money, women, men, by having retirement insurance and fire insurance, and other kind of insurances. I didn’t have to have these illusions.

I had never referred to the Eastern spiritual paths as such, because I never knew exactly what spirituality is or what a path is, and because I had never cared to think about these things, but obviously they also had no real solution at hand. Some dissatisfaction and unrest, some pleading prayers, and an endless battle always remained. Why should I still stay here?

The following day we spontaneously terminated our meditation retreat. I had already decided to return to Germany as fast as possible. Halfway back to civilization we again stopped at the bank of a river, which flowed into the Narmada River somewhere down the mountain in the valley. This was our last day in the mountains. We would have to go through enormous effort to reach this magical secluded spot, radiating fairytale-like beauty and stillness, once again. The river was still very narrow at this spot, high up in the mountains, and we had to circumvent big boulders eroded to roundness. The water flowed in absolute silence and serenity through the jungle. The night descended. The full moon slowly rose up in the sky, reflected in the water. Bit by bit the reflection of the moon approached the shore where I was sitting. My body was totally exhausted from the exertion of the hike. Upon arrival I had just let myself fall onto the rock and lay motionless for a long time. I was finished.

Now I was sitting next to the fire, my companion had already gone to sleep. The moon was shining huge and bright and seemed to express more truth then my entire ruminating. My whole dilemma had revealed itself again just a few hours earlier when we visited a place that didn’t seem of this world. It was alongside a lake, which lay in front of a huge cliff wall. Below the cliff there was an old village of the Gond-Baba, who had built their houses right in front of the Stone Age caves. Right at the waterline there was a huge fire. Dusk was falling, and the people gathered around the fire. We were climbing down into the ravine along a narrow path hewn into the cliff where Shiva had visibly manifested himself in the rock. Yogis and ascetics were sitting in the cliff niches on narrow projections. Laughing, they called out words to us, made jokes and gave us incense, ash and Prasad. The path took us deeper into the canyon. At the end of our path a space opened up, completely adorned with flowers, incense and candles. In front of Shiva and Parvati were standing, united in a dance, shrouded in the deep blue atmosphere of a natural cave. Everything seemed to be alive and vibrating. I sat down in the midst of the evident devotion and reverence of this place and the dance of consciousness and energy.

How did consciousness and energy fit together? How could I embrace this world and be happy at the same time? Why were there always two? How could one ever accept the death of the beloved?

I received no answer despite this incredible fullness and the breath-taking otherworldly atmosphere. In my opinion the ancient peoples of this earth had also not found any useful solutions.

The slowly gliding river in front of me didn’t seem to move. I again looked at the full round disc of the moon reflected in the water at my feet and simultaneously at the sky. Who was reflecting whom?

I didn’t want to be an ascetic, hostile to the body. I didn’t want to have to chasten myself, just to find the truth, only to somehow be able to endure all of this. The lunar disc came closer and closer and seemed to laugh as the water rippled in waves on the shore. Fucking questions! I smiled back at the moon and lay down to sleep, totally exhausted.

The next morning we packed our few belongings together for the last time. I forgot and left my little bells, which I had always worn on my feet in the jungle because of the snakes, between the rocks. A very peculiar man had invited us to a breakfast. He lived near the river, and I was very much looking forward to it. Already from a distance we could see him in front of his house. He had his feet up, was sitting on his veranda dressed in a military combat uniform and greeted us politely. My meditation companion had told me earlier that we were about to meet a tantric guru, and supposedly he was able to perform all kinds of supernatural things in the river. This man was also looking after the people in the village, he found work for them, and was making sure that the village was kept clean and that the kids went to school. Just now there was a group of villagers gathered around the television set watching an Indian soap of the Mahabharata

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. While he was having a conversation with us, ever smiling, and repeatedly encouraging us to eat, he chanted mantras incessantly between the words: ‘Ram, Ram, Ram, Sita-Ram’. The entire time he was rocking back and forth on his chair and he told us that during the war with Pakistan he had to kill a lot of people. This was the most ‘unholy of appearances’ that I had ever encountered in India, and for some reason it felt good to me. I felt his bright love, his respect and his truthful interest and compassion as I had never previously felt with any other human being. His eyes were glowing like headlights. While he laughed about our meditation practice, he simultaneously praised it, and as we were leaving he gave us the advice to find a guru if we wanted to avoid spending many more lifetimes in meditation. We also laughed and left the place highly delighted.

We took the next bus down to Bhopal. There we went our separate ways. My meditation friend went to Orissa on the Indian East Coast, and I was never to see him again. I took the train to Delhi in order to fly back to Germany with the next possible airplane. Three days later I landed in Frankfurt airport. It was spring, 1988, and I was twenty-three years old.

My ‘Skirt’ Time

‘Not-Two Is My Characteristic. No-“other“ Is My Characteristic.’

Adi Da

The arrival was a very unique experience, worthy of a Shakespearean comedy. I had completely forgotten how totally different this western world was. There I stood at the arrival terminal, after just having passed through the passport checkpoint, staring, totally flabbergasted. There was an unbelievable hustle and bustle and all the people around me seemed to be running. Some people were staring at me and were obviously turning up their noses at me. I was carrying a faded cloth bag that looked like a sack wrapped around me, on which a coconut shell serving as a drinking cup dangled. On my naked feet I was wearing worn-out Indian slippers. A faded red skirt that I had sewn myself was wrapped around my legs, and around my torso was wound in an old, threadbare linen blanket of natural color, which had served me faithfully on all occasions. I was wearing on a string around my neck a biggish piece of wood in form of a vagina, which I had found in the jungle by the river. I looked like a young Catweasel

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, who had landed in a wrong century. The smell of perfume and plastic was unbearable. The restless gray-blue coats and the business suits that were hurrying around just didn’t make any sense in my brain any more.

I entered the arrival terminal and sat down in the closest restaurant that did not appear too exclusive and I ordered – water. When I saw the doubtful but friendly look on the waitress I realized that my clothes must have an incredibly strong smell of fire, food, and Indian soap. My entire body, each cell in me smelled of India and jungle and meditation. I probably looked like it too. I got up and looked for the rest rooms – perhaps I should take a look at my appearance. I left all my things behind at the table in the restaurant and took the escalator down to the lower floor. I had scarcely found the rest rooms, grinning at my image in the mirror, sitting down on the toilet seat, honestly admiring the German cleanliness, and holding my head in my hands trying to comprehend where I had landed, when I suddenly heard my name being called through the speakers. Yes, it had to be me. I was to come immediately to the security service point.

Partly in panic, and partly laughing, I let my skirt back down and looked for the service point. Several gentlemen and a friendly woman were already waiting there. They were holding my luggage in their hands. Everything was unpacked and they were also holding my passport and some other stuff. What was to come now? Are you Mr. Petrus Faller? What a question. I nodded and laughed. You are not allowed to leave your pieces of luggage in a restaurant. And your passport has to be on your person at all times. I was back. This was definitely the western civilization. I grinned and pointed out to the gentlemen that without the passport they would not have found me. I packed my stuff and walked away with a sinking feeling in my stomach. I couldn’t tell these people that everything was impermanent and that death will also come for them one day.

I went to a phone and called a woman friend of mine, who could not believe that I had made it back again. While waiting for her to pick me up I went into the nearest supermarket but did not know what to buy. In the end I decided to buy items that were part of my former habit of overeating and vomiting. I sat down in the arrival terminal on a bench. There I spread out all the food carefully on my lap ready to show it to everybody. After the first few bites I had to stop. This world had to be mastered differently. I allowed the urge to feel contempt pass and then threw most of the food into the trash bin. I lay down on the bench and fell asleep exhausted, trusting that my woman friend would find me.

It took more than half a year to acclimatize myself again. I slept on the veranda outdoors or with the windows wide open. The walls in enclosed spaces seem to crush me. My senses seemed to have become so refined that I could literally smell fear. I read clearly what was going on in other people’s thoughts. I saw their hidden emotions and I could feel if they had just had sex. Much of the stuff that people normally hid behind their social and acquired behaviors was like an open book to me.

So I preferred to stay at home, did my daily yoga and meditation practice and gradually settled down. I first made myself some new outfits, long and flowing. For a small amount of money I leased a piece of land so I could grow my own vegetables. I resumed the renovation of my house, put in a pond, planted flowers and herbs in the garden and gave away my car, a Fiat 500 Bambini. I enjoyed the quiet life of a hermit and worked once a week in a health-food store. The wages for my work I got paid out in food. I had an additional small income through producing and selling herbal oils and natural clothes. I was the picture book Muesli-Man - drop out hippy.

Money had never been a high priority in my life. During my childhood my mother’s monthly income was just enough to last us exactly a month. In my youth I would take various summer vacation jobs to fatten up my pocket money. I financed my journey to India with savings I had made during the time of my apprenticeship and civil service. My journey hardly made a dent in those savings. Money was not a priority in which I invested much energy and it was not attractive to me, as neither in general was the rest of normal life. I participated in it to a degree, but it did not really interest me.

In that way, on an emotional level, I completely missed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. I was living in a kind of a pseudo-nirvana and had the feeling that it was time to go into an early pre-retirement. I was still reading a lot of books, mainly dealing with old myths, cultures and religions, which saw the feminine principle as the primary doorway to truth and happiness. Although I was practicing a Buddhist meditation technique, that went back all the way to the teachings of Gautama the Buddha, I had to put away the scriptures about the basics of mindfulness pretty much after a very short attempt to study them. My mind just did not want to absorb anything, and even after several attempts it was clearly futile. The same was the case with the ancient Vedas, the religious scriptures of the Hindus. This was not my world, and something inside of me was rebelling, but I could not grab hold of what it was. All this was just too structured and too thought through – too cerebral. What about the heart and human love?

When I was a child it was absolutely clear to me that I did not have to do anything in order to be happy or to just BE. Absolutely nothing! There was a sentence by Lao-tzu in my decaying school notes: “The path is eternally without doing, but nothing remains undone’.

This was pretty much how I felt. However, the western world constantly demanded that happiness is to be found in objects and the frenzy of consumerism. Similar to the pathology of bulimia this western philosophy could be summarized with one technical term: “Devour”. The spiritual paths wanted to get rid of the matter or, at any rate, saw a serious problem in it and were striving for emptiness or becoming one with something from which one is basically separate and which goes beyond matter. To stay with the terminology of bulimia one could summarize it with: ‘Vomit out’. Neither of these approaches really satisfied me, however I became a bit more relaxed.

At this point I attempted to work on the dramas of my childhood, and left the really big topics aside. The books of Krishnamurti also had a calming effect on my psyche. They strengthened my conviction that I had already experienced everything that is important.

My brother was still living with me in the house, in a separate apartment. The contact with him was limited. He had difficulties dealing with my way of living and just was not able to understand why I would not embark on a career. One year after I came back from India he moved out. From now on the house and the garden were to be shared with others.

My hermit life style was approaching its end. Before my time in India I had met and befriended a man who was living in Munich and studying psychology there. When I returned from India we started an intimate relationship and a deep and close friendship. He was a very handsome man with a beautiful body and he could have easily competed with any Hollywood star. He had a lot of energy and was also highly sexual. For two years I had not felt any sexual energy, and all of a sudden I was practically exploding. I would hitchhike to Munich every few weeks, still barefoot and in my flowing robes, and we would spend time together there. We would walk through the city holding hands and must have made a curious impression, but I really couldn’t have cared less. I was simply enjoying it immensely. After a couple of hours of a sightseeing tour through the city of Munich I had to retreat back inside the apartment. I just was not able to cope with that much stimulation, exposed to crowds of people and all that advertising. We would have sex with each other three to four times a day and we penetrated each other. I had no idea how much lust and horniness was hidden inside me and how wonderful it was to give oneself up and to be fucked in the ass. Heading back home after a few days, standing on the highway (Autobahn) I felt like a lascivious whore, brimming over with horniness and lewdness from each cell. I felt that everybody was able to notice it immediately. As I had already found out on my spiritual quest: You become that on which you meditate, in my case right now: penetrate.

My house slowly started to fill up. By and by the right people started showing up, and soon we were four people living and sharing in a communal manner. There was a man who wanted to create his own comedy theatre and who supported himself by doing street theatre and circus performances. There was a woman who was a chef in a celebrity Ayurvedic clinic in the Black Forest, and a carpenter, for whom our highly esteemed Ayurvedic chef would passionately cook one day, much, much later down the line. There were children, boyfriends and girlfriends who would visit over the weekend, and various theatre groups that would stop by in our house while on their summer tours. There was a constant coming and going. Our village, which was a Catholic pilgrimage destination, participated in our lives in a very lively manner through gossip, opinions and fantasies. From one room to the next we had groups for men, debates about cleaning schedules, love dramas, and there were Christmas parties abundant in alcoholic beverages and loud celebration, with bonfires in the garden. Due to the Ayurvedic spices and our trusty grain mill our breakfasts and the party banquets were highly coveted by all our guests. It was a wonderful time, and the house exuded abundance and joy. The house walls and the roof were totally covered with green and flowering creepers. The garden had transformed itself throughout the years into a fairytale landscape with a weeping willow, a pond and a huge stone spiral. Birches tightly crowded the entire house, and during the night bats hunted over the waters of the slowly gliding little brook. My beloved cat participated in all these happenings with total ease and enjoyment.

My life in our house-sharing community went on as usual. I continued with the renovation of the house, with the beautifying of the gardens, and the vegetable and herb growing, which took most of my time. I expanded my daily yoga schedule and learnt Tai Chi and Chi-gong in addition to it. I went for retreats two to three times a year to a recently inaugurated European meditation center, located in central France. While there I helped organize new courses, offered my service and felt how my meditation practice took on a new dimension.

The procedure in the meditation was always the same. When the mind reaches a certain degree of quietness and the awareness scans the body, different kinds of sensations become noticeable in various parts of the physical body. Some sensations disappear quite immediately or after a short period of time, and some are very persistent and stick around for over a longer stretch of time, but eventually they also disappear. There is no sensation that is permanent, there is no good or bad. Everything comes and goes. Very often emotions, images or thoughts from the past are connected to these sensations. Everything that we have experienced is stored in the body and has its effect whether we want it or not: cause and effect. At times the stirred up emotions, or sometimes the images, become overwhelming and still the mind does not want to stop thinking. All of that does not call for any involvement. The awareness simply stays with the observation of the sensations. When these sensations disappear deeper layers start emerging, experiences from former lives, memories, an array of possible new states and new sensations. And so it goes on and on and on. Every person who meditates naturally experiences his or her own individual process. Basically, this is the theory explained very simply.

The period of time for the first layers of my sensations to dissolve became shorter and shorter. The body, and especially the spine, started to shake, releasing new s